Conference registration is now closed. We can no longer take any more bookings.

andProfessor Ben Carrington (University of Texas at Austin) ‘Show me the money!’: Freedom, Resistance and the Cultural Politics of Sport.

The conference fee is £80. There is a fee of £40 for graduate students and for those with no institutional affiliation. To book a place go to the University of Brighton on-line shop.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to build on the momentum created by the first Reparative Histories symposium held in 2014 and by the subsequent publication of a special issue of Race & Class (‘Reparative Histories: radical narratives of ‘race’ and resistance’, Race and Class, 57, 3 (2016)). That first event was interested in critically addressing the ways in which conceptions of the ‘reparative’ are currently shaped and understood, and in exploring what it means to turn to history in the appeal for recognition and redress. We set out to explore the question of how to relate the past to the present in the context of ‘race’, narrative and representation. Significant issues stemming from the first symposium concerned the importance of thinking through forms of historical interconnectedness both spatially and temporally, and ways of addressing, the dialectics of anti-colonial struggle, anti-racist resistance and mobilisation. This conference aims to further develop the concept of ‘Reparative Histories’ and to build on these concerns.

Given that racialised meanings continue to powerfully structure understandings of identity, belonging and exclusion within multiple social, cultural political and economic spaces. How might we further trace the history and politics of the making and unmaking of ‘race’? How might we connect effectively these historical formulations and to the maintenance of particular contemporary power relations? This conference aims to explore critically the ways in which processes of making, re-making and un-making ‘race’ are rooted in particular histories, politics and cultures. The conference aims to further elucidate the processes of racialization associated with histories of imperialism, colonialism, transatlantic enslavement and other forms of global labour production. It also aims to question how ‘legacies’ might be traced in the light of contemporary social and economic formations. ‘Race’ continues to signify either by glossing its historical provenance, or by drawing upon it.

At the same time, ‘race’ and its histories, offer a powerful political platform for those engaged in anti-racist, anti-colonial resistance. These traditions of struggle are currently being re-activated and re-articulated in ways that confront the power and pull of the universalism of liberal orthodoxy and they are increasingly exposing its fault-lines and occlusions. What is the role of history and indeed, memory, in relation to these resistant political processes. How might representations of the past be activated for the now?

Conference Programme

Thursday April 6th

9.30 – 10.00 Registration, Tea and Coffee

10.00 – 10.15 Welcome

10.5 – 11.45 Panel
1: Racialised Legacies Chair: Trish McManus

Joyce Hope Scott
(Wheelock College, Boston) “The Political Economy of Blackness:
History, Law and Narrative in Construction of the Black Body”

Brian Kelly (Queens
University, Belfast) “Not all Black and White: Race, Property and
the Reaction against Emancipation in the US South”

Lawrence Aje
(University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, France) “Striking a
Balance? Memorial Equality and Compensatory Public History in South
Carolina in the context of the National Conversation about Race”

Christian Høgsbjerg
(University of Leeds, UK) “Race and Revolution: The Making,
Re-Making and Un-making of ‘Race’ during the Haitian Revolution”